Prison education struggles amid cuts

Ex-convict Jorge Renaud discovered philosophy and psychology in classes taught behind the razor-wire fences and cinder-block walls of Texas prisons.

It changed his life.

Renaud’s family traveled constantly when he was a child, following the crops to such southwestern farming hubs as Dimmitt and Cactus, he said. At 17, he joined the U.S. Army and spent three years in the service. When he got out in 1977, Renaud turned to making quick money from quick crimes, after he committed burglary of a habitation. It landed him in the state penitentiary.

“Why does anybody commit a crime? Stupidity, ignorance, irresponsibility,” he said. “I thought I needed material possessions.”

After he was released in 1980, he committed two aggravated robberies within the next decade and went back to prison.


That’s when Renaud turned to post-secondary education, with help from the prison education system. He said the classes helped him find his way out of the prison stint.

“Prison has to offer a hope, a rope to those who are drowning,” he said. “To some people, it’s religion. But even then, you will want to have some critical thinking skills. Where are you going to get that?”
There are fewer educational opportunities for Texas prison inmates following state lawmakers’ decision to slash the Windham School District’s budget by more than a fourth, from $130.6 million for the 2010-11 academic year to $95 million in 2011-12, district spokeswoman Bambi Kiser said.

More than 77,500 prisoners enrolled in classes last year. Established in 1969, Windham is funded by the Texas Education Agency and is overseen by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

She said the district predicted 16,750 fewer offenders will be able to take classes for the 2011-12 school year.

District officials made the most cuts to schools with student enrollments averaging 40 or older because studies have shown that educational programs are more likely to reduce recidivism for younger offenders, Kiser said.
Texas Panhandle prisons house about 11,250 inmates, and more than half were taking classes last year, according to the Department of Criminal Justice and Windham documents. Of the eight regional units, nearly half have student enrollments averaging 40 or older.

All of those prison school budgets took significant cuts — the most at the Jordan Unit in Pampa, which was reduced by nearly $292,000, Kiser said.

The cuts amounted to a streamlined administration, where some principals will supervise more than one school and travel to other campuses about once a week, Kiser said. The budget reduction also means a loss of 271 full-time employees — 22 in the Texas Panhandle units, she said.

On top of the layoffs, the district’s consumable supplies budget was slashed by about half. These items include pencils, paper and toner cartridges, among other school supplies.

The Criminal Justice Department denied requests to sit in classes or talk to current prison students about the educational programs.

Sen. Kel Seliger, R-Amarillo, who served as the vice chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee from 2004 to 2010, said all state departments had to trim their budgets.

“Public education is very important in the prison system because it does help when it comes to recidivism,” Seliger said. “But Windham has gotten very expensive per completion.”

Of all the school district’s students, nearly 7 percent — or 5,287 prisoners — obtained a General Education Development certificate last year, according to Windham documents. Nearly 340 offenders, or 5 percent of students, in the Panhandle prisons received a GED, district documents state.
“It doesn’t mean we’ve turned our backs on prisoner education,” Seliger said. “We just need to do it as effectively and economically as possible.”

Lawmakers had to prioritize during the last legislative session, said Ana Yanez-Correa, executive director of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, a nonprofit organization that researches and analyzes criminal justice policies. But, she argued, the district will not increase the number of students obtaining GED diplomas by making it unavailable. The district will only get worse results that way, she said.

Statewide budget cuts dealt the prison education system another blow. The district did not renew seven college contracts, Kiser said. The higher education agencies offered vocational training and post-
secondary education for the prisoners.

Amarillo College, which provided diesel mechanics and data processing courses, served nearly 50 students a year at the Clements and Neal units, Kiser said. But AC and Clarendon College were among those that did not receive a renewed contract, she said.

The only college that will now serve the region’s prisons is Western Texas College, based in Snyder, she said.
Lawmakers also gutted state reimbursable funds — assistance money that prisoners can use for continuing education — by about 42 percent, Kiser said. The funds are similar to student loans in that offenders must pay back what they borrow, and that is returned to the state, she said.

Renaud, 55, who is slated to receive a master’s of science in social work in May 2012, said most offenders cannot afford continuing education without aid, and the reductions do not bode well for prison recidivism rates.
“Education helps you better relate to people. It gives you the discipline and communication skills to keep a job,” he said. “Education can give you tools to deal with a moral situation.”

Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee, said there is a need for prisoner education, but officials should look at a different model.

“Windham has become too top-heavy,” he said. “It has outlived its usefulness.”
Whitmire said the Criminal Justice Department could do away with administrative costs by outsourcing teaching to area junior colleges.

Yanez-Correa said the department also needs to maintain prisoner education by exploring innovative ways to get better outcomes.


The coalition is currently surveying all prisoners who have written to the organization and their families on what has helped them, she said. A lot of them have said the Windham School District has made a positive influence on them, she said.

“If they don’t have that, what is it that they have?”
Yanez-Correa asked.

Bottom line: It’s a win-win situation to provide a prisoner with education, she said.

She said educating prisoners is a better return for taxpayers because of its negative correlation with recidivism.

How do prisoners get so fit?

A new book Felon Fitness,(www.sureshotbooks.com) has collated all the workouts that prisoners use to stay in shape. How did they work for our reporter?

It is not the point of it, exactly, but there is no doubt that prison is an excellent place to get fit. Whenever lawyer William Kroger went to visit his clients inside, he noticed what great shape they were in. Eventually he set about collecting exercises and routines from all over the California state prison system. The result is Felon Fitness, the complete guide to getting a body just like a convict serving 20 years to life.

I committed myself to attempting a selection of the exercises in the book, even though I haven't done anything wrong. Frankly most of them are pretty ordinary – I'd done a number of them at the gym that very morning except in the book they are demonstrated by men with lots of tattoos using "prison dumbbells" fashioned from bed sheets and old magazines. A few, however, looked criminally difficult.

First on my list was the handstand press-up: you do a handstand, resting your feet on an adjacent wall for balance, and then raise and lower yourself on your arms. Prisoner Manuel Meza does 10 of these every Wednesday, as part of a gruelling five-day workout routine. I managed precisely zero.

Likewise, I failed to achieve a single "celly" press-up, where your cellmate lies on your back, a personal humiliation that left me trapped face down on the floor until such time as my wife decided she had other matters to attend to.

Some inspirational words from the prisoners ("Because I am in shape and by the grace of God," writes one, "I was able to fight off two inmates wielding homemade knives, with minor injuries.") spurred me on, and I breezed through 20 Romanian squats, a type of one-legged knee-bend with your back leg resting on a chair. After that I called it a day because, as I said, I'd already been to the gym that morning and I needed to save enough strength to untie my shoes later on.

But one day soon I will manage a handstand press-up, then five, then 10. And then everyone around here will stop messing with me.   Visit www.sureshotbooks.com

Prisons Ban Reading Shakespeare for Inmates

When Malcolm X made the transition from a crimminal to a Civil Rights icon he credited the books he was able to read while in prison for his success. But the catalyst that took a man from the streets to the history books is often denied to those incarcerated today as many U.S. prisons have started banning most reading materials.

Nationwide, the works of Toni Morrison and Sojourner Truth have reportedly been banned in prisons, even Shakespeare. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a suit against the Berkeley County Jail in South Carolina, because inmates there are allegedly only allowed to read the Bible. And by July this year, the Connecticut Department of Corrections plans to further limit the books inmates there can read over concerns that an ex-con took part in the notorious Petit family murders in 2007 after reading violent books in prison.


“The idea that this horrific crime was a result of what they read in jail and not other factors is simplistic,” said David C. Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, to theLoop21. “The Bible contains many scenes of appalling violence and cruelty, but no one suggests that prisoners should not be allowed to read the Bible.”

A publication called the Prison Legal News (PLN), which produces materials informing inmates of their rights, is the plaintiff in the ACLU’s lawsuit against Berkeley County Detention Center, along with the U.S. Justice Department. In 2008, a staffer at the jail allegedly told a PLN staffer that the publication was banned there due to its Bible-only policy.

PLN editor Paul Wright told theLoop21 that over the last 10 to 15 years, correctional facilities have become increasingly likely to implement policies of blanket censorship on reading materials. During that timeframe, he said that PLN has been involved in a few dozen lawsuits involving reading bans in prisons. He said the inclination towards censorship reflects how “overall, all Americans’ civil and constitutional rights are being undermined, not just in prisons and jails.”

While no one’s arguing that prisoners should be reading books that instruct them on, say, picking locks or tunnel digging to help them escape, imposing blanket bans on what they can read does a disservice to them and to society generally. Campus Progress points out, for example, that there’s a direct correlation between illiteracy and incarceration. Like Malcolm X when he entered prison, an estimated 70 percent of inmates cannot read above a grade school level. That figure grows to 85 percent among juvenile inmates. Given that at 38.3 percent,  the number of African Americans in prison is nearly triple their share of the U.S. population overall, reading bans in correctional facilities directly impact the ability of many African American immates to educate themselves.



Reading has long been used as a vehicle to help rehabilitate prisoners.

“Research shows the best predictors that a prisoner will be able to return to the community and live a productive life depends on whether they’ve maintained connections to the outside word,” Fathi said. “Allowing prisoners to receive books, newspapers and magazine helps them engage and is very important from a public safety standpoint.”

The late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was just one high-profile advocate for protecting prisoners’ right to read. He argued, “When the prison gates slam behind an inmate, he does not lose his human quality; his yearning for self-respect does not end; nor is his quest for self-realization concluded. If anything, the needs for identity and self-respect are more compelling in the dehumanizing prison environment.”

In the effort to get tough on crime there has been an overall shift to prison being about solely about punishment, not about rehabilitation. But with so many prison inmates being addicts or having severe mental health needs, our prisons have become the new asylums and rehab clinics. A prison record already reduces the chances of employment post-release for most ex-convicts. If denied even the basics of rehabilitation -- reading for self-enrichment -- what hope is there for those convicted to ever have a productive life outside of the penal system?

Brief sentences become defacto "life sentences" as drug and non-violent crime offenders are trapped behind a label they cannot shake.

Jail inmates, western Pa. college students study criminology together

BEAVER, Pa. — On nearly every Tuesday morning since mid-January, a group of about 16 students has gathered at the Beaver County Jail.

Most are young, in their early 20s. They've come to Beaver County from all over the United States, as far away as California and Maine. They sit paired together at small classroom tables, listening to guest speakers, discussing textbooks and working on group projects.

At the end of each class, when the jail's thick metal front door slams shut, half of the students are on one side and half are on the other.

The class, simply titled "Criminology," brings Geneva College undergraduates and jail inmates together to talk about the justice system — how it functions, how it's flawed and its impact on communities and society as a whole.
And there's an added twist. Most classes feature a guest speaker who works in local law enforcement or the judicial system.

"It's not every day you get to talk to the same people that put you in here," said Geovannie Albertorio, 22, a class member who is serving a five- to 10-year sentence for armed robbery.

If there's one overarching theme to the discussions, it's this: The American criminal justice system is badly in need of reform.

That's one thing that the inmates, academics and most of the guests tended to agree on. Speakers included District Attorney Anthony Berosh, Detective Capt. Tony McClure and President Judge John D. McBride, who spoke to the class for the first time in the spring 2011 semester.

"I wanted to get across to (the class) that we judges even function within a system and we have restrictions on what we can do and can't do," McBride said later. "We have to keep working. We have to keep doing our job and discovering better ways to do things."

The idea for the class came to Beaver County Jail Chaplain Denny Ugoletti about four years ago, when he was thumbing through an issue of American Jails Magazine and read about a similar program affiliated with Temple University.

The basic premise was that bringing college students and incarcerated people together in a learning environment would benefit everyone involved, and create more informed, more open-minded citizens in the long run.

It works, Ugoletti said. He now sees it happen in Beaver County, semester after semester.
"It breaks down stereotypes," he said. "Many students come in here with a fear. They have these preconceived notions that inmates are gorillas, thugs, monsters."

And it lets inmates experience taking a college course with college students, reading the same books, doing the same work and taking the same tests. In about half of the seven semesters since the class began, Ugoletti said, an inmate student has had the highest grade.

"That was the first time I'd been in a class since I was 19," said Anthony Terry, who's now 26 and serving a federal sentence for possession with intent to distribute cocaine. "You're showing yourself you can still do things you thought you gave up on. ... You're not just this drug dealer that's locked up."

The class is extremely popular with jail residents, said Deputy Warden Carol Steele-Smith, who coordinates the program on the jail side. To narrow the list, she asks prospective students to write an essay about why they want to take the class.

It's so popular with Geneva students that Brad Frey, the sociology professor who leads the course, said it fills almost immediately when course registration opens.

The experience is transformative, Frey said, for students inside, as well as outside, the walls of the jail.

"As good as it is to hear the (guest speakers) present, it's the collaboration between the Geneva students and the inmate students that makes it work," Frey said. "The learning is so rich."